Rain and a blind sky and a bursting sea Feliu and his men, Miguel and
Mateo, looked out upon the thundering and flashing of the monstrous
tide. The wind had fallen, and the gray air was full of gulls. Behind
the cheniere, back to the cloudy line of low woods many miles away,
stretched a wash of lead-colored water, with a green point piercing it
here and there--elbow-bushes or wild cane tall enough to keep their
heads above the flood. But the inundation was visibly
decreasing;--with the passing of each hour more and more green patches
and points had been showing themselves: by degrees the course of the
bayou had become defined--two parallel winding lines of dwarf-timber
and bushy shrubs traversing the water toward the distant
cypress-swamps. Before the cheniere all the shell-beach slope was piled
with wreck--uptorn trees with the foliage still fresh upon them,
splintered timbers of mysterious origin, and logs in multitude, scarred
with gashes of the axe. Feliu and his comrades had saved wood enough
to build a little town,--working up to their waists in the surf, with
ropes, poles, and boat-hooks. The whole sea was full of flotsam. Voto
a Cristo!--what a wrecking there must have been! And to think the
Carmencita could not be taken out!
They had seen other luggers making eastward during the morning--could
recognize some by their sails, others by their gait,--exaggerated in
their struggle with the pitching of the sea: the San Pablo, the
Gasparina, the Enriqueta, the Agueda, the Constanza. Ugly water,
yes!--but what a chance for wreckers! ... Some great ship must have
gone to pieces;--scores of casks were rolling in the trough,--casks of
wine. Perhaps it was the Manila,--perhaps the Nautilus!
A dead cow floated near enough for Mateo to throw his rope over one
horn; and they all helped to get it out. It was a milch cow of some
expensive breed; and the owner's brand had been burned upon the
horns:--a monographic combination of the letters A and P. Feliu said
he knew that brand: Old-man Preaulx, of Belle-Isle, who kept a sort of
dairy at Last Island during the summer season, used to mark all his
cows that way. Strange!
But, as they worked on, they began to see stranger things,--white dead
faces and dead hands, which did not look like the hands or the faces of
drowned sailors: the ebb was beginning to run strongly, and these were
passing out with it on the other side of the mouth of the
bayou;--perhaps they had been washed into the marsh during the night,
when the great rush of the sea came. Then the three men left the water,
and retired to higher ground to scan the furrowed Gulf;--their
practiced eyes began to search the courses of the sea-currents,--keen
as the gaze of birds that watch the wake of the plough. And soon the
casks and the drift were forgotten; for it seemed to them that the tide
was heavy with human dead--passing out, processionally, to the great
open. Very far, where the huge pitching of the swells was diminished by
distance into a mere fluttering of ripples, the water appeared as if
sprinkled with them;--they vanished and became visible again at
irregular intervals, here and there--floating most thickly
eastward!--tossing, swaying patches of white or pink or blue or black
each with its tiny speck of flesh-color showing as the sea lifted or
lowered the body. Nearer to shore there were few; but of these two
were close enough to be almost recognizable: Miguel first discerned
them. They were rising and falling where the water was deepest--well
out in front of the mouth of the bayou, beyond the flooded sand-bars,
and moving toward the shell-reef westward. They were drifting almost
side by side. One was that of a negro, apparently well attired, and
wearing a white apron;--the other seemed to be a young colored girl,
clad in a blue dress; she was floating upon her face; they could
observe that she had nearly straight hair, braided and tied with a red
ribbon. These were evidently house-servants,--slaves. But from
whence? Nothing could be learned until the luggers should return; and
none of them was yet in sight. Still Feliu was not anxious as to the
fate of his boats, manned by the best sailors of the coast. Rarely are
these Louisiana fishermen lost in sudden storms; even when to other
eyes the appearances are most pacific and the skies most splendidly
blue, they divine some far-off danger, like the gulls; and like the
gulls also, you see their light vessels fleeing landward. These men
seem living barometers, exquisitely sensitive to all the invisible
changes of atmospheric expansion and compression; they are not easily
caught in those awful dead calms which suddenly paralyze the wings of a
bark, and hold her helpless in their charmed circle, as in a nightmare,
until the blackness overtakes her, and the long-sleeping sea leaps up
foaming to devour her.
--"Carajo!"
The word all at once bursts from Feliu's mouth, with that peculiar
guttural snarl of the "r" betokening strong excitement,--while he
points to something rocking in the ebb, beyond the foaming of the
shell-reef, under a circling of gulls. More dead? Yes--but something
too that lives and moves, like a quivering speck of gold; and Mateo
also perceives it, a gleam of bright hair,--and Miguel likewise, after
a moment's gazing. A living child;--a lifeless mother. Pobrecita! No
boat within reach, and only a mighty surf-wrestler could hope to swim
thither and return!
But already, without a word, brown Feliu has stripped for the
struggle;--another second, and he is shooting through the surf, head
and hands tunnelling the foam hills.... One--two--three lines
passed!--four!--that is where they first begin to crumble white from
the summit,--five!--that he can ride fearlessly! ... Then swiftly,
easily, he advances, with a long, powerful breast-stroke,--keeping his
bearded head well up to watch for drift,--seeming to slide with a swing
from swell to swell,--ascending, sinking,--alternately presenting
breast or shoulder to the wave; always diminishing more and more to the
eyes of Mateo and Miguel,--till he becomes a moving speck, occasionally
hard to follow through the confusion of heaping waters ... You are not
afraid of the sharks, Feliu!--no: they are afraid of you; right and
left they slunk away from your coming that morning you swam for life in
West-Indian waters, with your knife in your teeth, while the balls of
the Cuban coast-guard were purring all around you. That day the
swarming sea was warm,--warm like soup--and clear, with an emerald
flash in every ripple,--not opaque and clamorous like the Gulf today
... Miguel and his comrade are anxious. Ropes are unrolled and
inter-knotted into a line. Miguel remains on the beach; but Mateo,
bearing the end of the line, fights his way out,--swimming and wading
by turns, to the further sandbar, where the water is shallow enough to
stand in,--if you know how to jump when the breaker comes.
But Feliu, nearing the flooded shell-bank, watches the white
flashings,--knows when the time comes to keep flat and take a long,
long breath. One heavy volleying of foam,--darkness and hissing as of
a steam-burst; a vibrant lifting up; a rush into light,--and again the
volleying and the seething darkness. Once more,--and the fight is won!
He feels the upcoming chill of deeper water,--sees before him the green
quaking of unbroken swells,--and far beyond him Mateo leaping on the
bar,--and beside him, almost within arm's reach, a great billiard-table
swaying, and a dead woman clinging there, and ... the child.
A moment more, and Feliu has lifted himself beside the waifs ... How
fast the dead woman clings, as if with the one power which is strong as
death,--the desperate force of love! Not in vain; for the frail
creature bound to the mother's corpse with a silken scarf has still the
strength to cry out:--"Maman! maman!" But time is life now; and the
tiny hands must be pulled away from the fair dead neck, and the scarf
taken to bind the infant firmly to Feliu's broad shoulders,--quickly,
roughly; for the ebb will not wait ...
And now Feliu has a burden; but his style of swimming has totally
changed;--he rises from the water like a Triton, and his powerful arms
seem to spin in circles, like the spokes of a flying wheel. For now is
the wrestle indeed!--after each passing swell comes a prodigious
pulling from beneath,--the sea clutching for its prey.
But the reef is gained, is passed;--the wild horses of the deep seem to
know the swimmer who has learned to ride them so well. And still the
brown arms spin in an ever-nearing mist of spray; and the outer
sand-bar is not far off,--and there is shouting Mateo, leaping in the
surf, swinging something about his head, as a vaquero swings his noose!
... Sough! splash!--it struggles in the trough beside Feliu, and the
sinewy hand descends upon it. Tiene!--tira, Miguel! And their feet
touch land again! ...
She is very cold, the child, and very still, with eyes closed.
--"Esta muerta, Feliu?" asks Mateo.
--"No!" the panting swimmer makes answer, emerging, while the waves
reach whitely up the sand as in pursuit,--"no; vive! respira todavia!"
Behind him the deep lifts up its million hands, and thunders as in
acclaim.